Wendy New­man, au­thor of (so named be­cause she went on that many be­fore meet­ing her part­ner), lays out four ways we’re de­rail­ing our dat­ing life...and four things we can do about it.

1. Lit­er­ally, just do it. “Start dat­ing. Be in­ten­tional. Get on­line—it’s the place peo­ple go to meet some­one for a re­la­tion­ship, pe­riod.” 2. Make the first move. “Reach out to peo­ple. There are all kinds of ex­perts who say that women shouldn’t make the first move or that ‘the one who speaks first loses all the power.’ That’s crap. I’d say that of all my great first dates with qual­ity men, I reached out to 80 per­cent of them. I didn’t ask them out—I wanted them to pur­sue me—but I had to let them know that in the sea of mil­lions of peo­ple out there on­line, I ex­isted.” 3. Drop the hand­ker­chief. “The way I got so many dates with­out pur­su­ing men was by drop­ping ‘the vir­tual hand­ker­chief.’ I would write one or two short para­graphs about some­thing we had in com­mon or some­thing I was im­pressed by, or I’d ad­dress some­thing un­usual in his pro­file, and I’d al­ways in­clude a ques­tion. No an­swer meant not in­ter­ested. A short re­ply to my email with­out the an­swer to my ques­tion made me as­sume he was be­ing po­lite but was also un­in­ter­ested. I was on the look­out for those who en­thu­si­as­ti­cally wrote back.” 4. Make it real. “Meet right away. Try­ing to vet some­one in ad­vance doesn’t pro­vide any more safety than meet­ing them in a bright pub­lic place. Writ­ing epic emails and day­dream­ing about your fu­ture with them is a colos­sal waste of time. Most first dates are over in the first few min­utes be­cause there isn’t a con­nec­tion.”

don’t

1. Be all #squad­goals all the time. “The top thing women do wrong is go out in a girl pack. How much fun do you think it is for some­one to walk up to a group of six women at a ta­ble to see if one of them is in­ter­ested? Stand on your own for a while and see if that at­trac­tive per­son makes his or her way to you—or make your way to him or her, away from your friends.” 2. Miss what’s in front of you. “We’re all guilty of not look­ing up to see who’s check­ing us out. We’re lost in our phones, a book, the on­go­ing word game we’ve been play­ing with a friend since 2012. We don’t give peo­ple in the real world a chance to con­nect with us.” 3. Ex­pect it to just, like, hap­pen. “We say we want to meet our spe­cial some­one, but then we don’t do any­thing about it. We aren’t ac­tively work­ing on it be­cause we’re em­ploy­ing wish­ful think­ing—like declar­ing we’re ready for our per­son and then as­sum­ing they will mag­i­cally show up. I’ve rarely heard that story turn out.” 4. Date un­til you’re ready. “The most costly mis­take that you can make when you’re try­ing to meet some­one is not do­ing the prep work. It’s im­por­tant to know who you are, what you’re af­ter and what’s never go­ing to be okay with you. By the end of my dat­ing process, I knew my­self, what I was look­ing for and what I wasn’t look­ing for, and my list was long! Peo­ple said, ‘You’re too picky.’ Turns out I wasn’t—it just took a while. My part­ner has ev­ery­thing on my list of things and a lit­tle bit more.” h